Our paper demonstrates that aggregation operator characteristics count as a promising avenue for applied fuzzy set research. It is shown by means of two cases that these characteristics are particularly valuable as proxies for hard to measure domain knowledge within the fields of customer satisfaction and country-of-origin. More in detail, the uninorm's neutral element could be identified as a useful asset for representing customers' expectations while the OWA operator's omess contributes to the quantification of consumers' degree of optimism when evaluating products coming from abroad. Both theoretical and empirical validation is provided to support the basic assumption that aggregation operator characteristics enable us to obtain superior consumer information with substantial managerial relevance.